I wanted a simple CSV to analyse the results of students making decisions in the articulate 360 software. Apparently, the storyline 3 software supports xAPI, which I hope to explore, but for now I am happy with a CSV of their answers that could be accessed by anyone with a URL.

Storyline lets users insert small snippets of Javascript into their cards, this is the approach I took.

Created a Google Form with the answer to questions or decisions being asked

Imported Jquery

Used Storyline to set variables

Use Javascript to get storyline variables and submitted these variables to the Google Form via ajax

Used Google Forms responses tab to analyse the responses or download the CSV.

Firstly, some ‘here be dragons’; I am new to storyline having only played with it quite briefly. There may be better ways and feedback is really welcome. These are my notes, but if anybody needs to me to expand them then just ask.

Create a Google Forms

First you want to create a Google form that will collect the data you want. I have a 3 slides, each of which has 4 buttons. Each button collects a different answer for the question on the slide and moves it to the next slide. The answer is stored in a variable.

For now, you’ll want to create a form that will collect these answers. Head to forms.google.com, sign in to your Google account and chose to create a new blank form. For each answer you want to collect from storyline create a new question. For example, if you have 5 slides with a question on each and you want to record an answer from each you will want 5 questions.

Here is my form, I just have a title and 3 questions with short answer boxes:

Add jQuery to Storyline Slide

Now we want to switch back to storyline. On the final slide we want to add jquery so we can submit them through an AJAX call. We are going to be revisiting this bit of Javascript and adding bits to it. For now we will just add jquery to the slide. To add the, head to your final slide and add some javascript as so:

Create a new trigger

Set action to ‘Execute JavaScript’

Set ‘when’ to timeline starts

You now want to click the “…” box next to “Script” and paste in this javascript. You do not need script tags:

Get Storyline to set variables

You now need to go back and set variables, this is quite a common and easy task in Storyline and you may have already done this. What we want to do here is set the variables so they are equal to whatever the data is we want to capture. For example, you might have a slide called question1 with 4 buttons to press and we want to record which button was pressed. Similar to the picture in section 2 we want to create a trigger on each of these 4 buttons. This time though, instead of ‘execute javascript’ we want to set a variable. So, for a question1 slide with 4 buttons we want to create a trigger on each button that sets a variable to the value of the answer.

For the sake of this example I am going to assume we have three slides, each with a question on. Each slide has 4 buttons that send the user to the next page and save a variable (“questionone”, “questiontwo” or “questionthree”) equal to the name of the button being pressed.

Use Javascript to get storyline variables and submitted these variables to the Google Form via ajax

Now we want to head back to the final slide and edit the javascript we started before. We are not going to delete the javascript, but going to add a function to it. So under the previous text add the following function:

function postToGoogle() {

var player=GetPlayer();

var questionone=player.GetVar(“questionone “);

var questiontwo=player.GetVar(“questiontwo “);

var questionthree=player.GetVar(“questionthree “);

var field1 = questionone;

var field2 = questiontwo;

var field3 = questionthree;

$.ajax({

url: “FORM”,

data: {“x “: field1, “x”: field2, “x”: field3},

type: “POST”,

dataType: “xml”,

statusCode: {

0: function() {

//Success message

},

200: function() {

//Success Message

}

}

});

}

A lot of this code is borrowed from the jquery site so I have left it as-is. However, I am not sure you will actually get a response code because of cross-domain policies. It would be good if somebody could give me feedback on that. If you have more questions then you will need to add more question variables and add extra fields in the json data element.

Edit the function with your Google Form details

There are 4 bits of information the above function needs to work, locate the bits that say “url: “FORM” and the bits that look like this: “x “: field1.

Firstly we need to replace the FORM with the URL that we are submitting to. To get this head over your Google Form and press the view button and then examine the html. You are looking for a url that ends in formResponse and should look like this “https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/<FORM_ID>/formResponse”, Copy and paste it over ‘FORM’.

We now need the ID for each field. They look something like this: ‘entry.<id>’. You can either exaime the source looking for these, or better still just inspect the elements using your browsers dev tools. Each X needs to be replaced with the entry and id.

Use the function and try

Inbetween the two bits of javascript call the function:

postToGoogle()

Now whenever you run that slide and set variables will be sent to the form as a response, you can download all responses or view them one by one in forms as such (mine is full of test data):

I had a message from a subscriber asking if I could make a short video on how to get a list of attendees from a Facebook event. One super quick way to do this is through the Facepager app. Firstly download the app from the Github releases page and install; the latest version as of today is 3.8 on Windows and 3.7 on Mac. I’ve created a quick video which shows you how to get the data and export it to CSV. You might also want to get a list of interested or declined people, the video briefly goes over that at the end.

Step by step instructions:
1. Create a database by clicking the New Database picture at the top of the screen. You can call it whatever you wish and save it wherever you like.
2. Click ‘Add node; in the top area.
3. In the dialogue box that opens you want to type in the id of your event. You can get this by opening a browser and going to the facebook page of your event. In the URL there will be a load of numbers, this is the id. Copy and paste it into facepager.
4. Click the node in the menu box.
5. Next to resource select /attending
6. Change maximum pages to something high
7. Click Login to Facebook. Once logged in the Access token should fill in.
8. Press Fetch Data.
9. Select new columns and click export data.
10. Do whatever you want with the data!

Facebook reminds me of my commitments. I noticed there are a few birthdays today, I haven’t seen many of them in years, but I still must say Happy Birthday and leave a string of cake emoji’s. There are some other prompts too; it has been 5 years since I went to place X with person Y, I should share this memory. Somebody else has just downloaded the messenger app, Facebook reminds me this is a person I know and should send them a message. I barely recognise them, they were a friend at school but they look different now.

Off the top of my head I can remember about 5 birthdays, there are about 15 birthdays that I know the month but not the exact day. In the offline world it is my knowledge that creates a commitment. I know people’s birthday, who they are, what they look like. I might also know what type of cake or present they will enjoy. It is my knowledge of the person that creates a commitment. When I don’t have that knowledge, Facebook will step in, and create that commitment for me. Is that the same type of commitment?

Being able to ‘step in and create a commitment’ is very power. I had a letter from my MP, a supposedly handwritten note from her election campaign with a picture and a signature and everything. I think this was also to remind me that we have a commitment, all I really know is somewhere their office has got data on my address and name. Interestingly I had a ‘suggested post’ on Facebook from the other main candidate – someone I used to go to gigs with a long time ago! Facebook has used my data to try and remind me I have a commitment to him too.

Saying “Happy Birthday” on Facebook to people I haven’t seen in 18 years is a commitment generated by the data that Facebook has, otherwise I’d have no idea. A military friend (as in Facebook friend, or are they a real friend? I can’t remember) received this sponsored post:

Excited to see a “subterranean” Conservative advert on my Facebook feed. My demographic must be swayed by defence spending pic.twitter.com/7fmM3yYngy

Facebook reminds them of their commitment to armed forces! Funnily enough I didn’t get that sponsored message.

A (Real!) friend recently tried to describe a simulacrum to me. I still haven’t really grasped the concept yet, but I gather is that a lot of my favourite sci-fi authors wrote great books around the concept while taking acid. Especially a simulacrum is a imitation of a person or thing but it is not quite the original, Philip K Dicks books seem to explore this a lot. Do androids dream of electric sheep is the first book that comes to mind, but also Man in the high tower.

From what I can gather from some of the ideas behind simulacrum is there are different ways it can be represented – a basic reflection of what is real, a pervasion of what is real, a pretence or something that bears no relation. They become a truth in their own right, making it difficult to distinguish reality from the simulation. Is this commitment that Facebook says is important really important to me or is it in the interest of organisations that have my data to make them seem important. Or perhaps some ‘data-driven commitments’ weren’t important but should be? Perhaps they are commitments generated by a surrogate life that knows better? Who knows?

“Well, I’ll tell you,” he said. “This whole damn historicity business is nonsense. Those Japs are bats. I’ll prove it.” Getting up, he hurried into his study, returned at once with two cigarette lighters which he set down on the coffee table. “Look at these. Look the same, don’t they? Well, listen. One has historicity in it.” He grinned at her. “Pick them up. Go ahead. One’s worth, oh, maybe forty or fifty thousand dollars on the collectors’ market.”

The girl gingerly picked up the two lighters and examined them.

“Don’t you feel it?” he kidded her. “The historicity?”

She said, “What is ‘historicity’?”

“When a thing has history in it. Listen. One of those two Zippo lighters was in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s pocket when he was assassinated. And one wasn’t. One has historicity, a hell of a lot of it. As much as any object ever had. And one has nothing. Can you feel it?” He nudged her. “You can’t. You can’t tell which is which. There’s no ‘mystical plasmic presence,’ no ‘aura’ around it.”

“Gee,” the girl said, awed. “Is that really true? That he had one of those on him that day?”

“Sure. And I know which it is. You see my point. It’s all a big racket; they’re playing it on themselves. I mean, a gun goes through a famous battle, like the Meuse-Argonne, and it’s the same as if it hadn’t, unless you know. It’s in here.” He tapped his head. “In the mind, not the gun. I used to be a collector. In fact, that’s how I got into this business. I collected stamps. Early British colonies.”

The girl now stood at the window, her arms folded, gazing out at the lights of downtown San Francisco. “My mother and dad used to say we wouldn’t have lost the war if he had lived,” she said.

“Okay,” Wyndam-Matson went on. “Now suppose say last year the Canadian Government or somebody, anybody, finds the plates from which some old stamp was printed. And the ink. And a supply of—”

“I don’t believe either of those two lighters belonged to Franklin Roosevelt,” the girl said.

Wyndam-Matson giggled. “That’s my point! I’d have to prove it to you with some sort of document. A paper of authenticity. And so it’s all a fake, a mass delusion. The paper proves its worth, not the object itself!”

“Show me the paper.”

“Sure.” Hopping up, he made his way back into the study. From the wall he took the Smithsonian Institution’s framed certificate; the paper and the lighter had cost him a fortune, but they were worth it—because they enabled him to prove that he was right, that the word “fake” meant nothing really, since the word “authentic” meant nothing really.

“A Colt .44 is a Colt .44,” he called to the girl as he hurried back into the living room. “It has to do with bore and design, not when it was made. It has to do with—”

She held out her hand. He gave her the document.

“So it is genuine,” she said finally.

“Yes. This one.” He picked up the lighter with the long scratch across its side.

There are quite a few posts describing the evil Internet communities that posts pictures of that frog thing and promote hate. I find Internet communities quite interesting, I don’t think I’ve ever belonged to an Internet community. Back in 1999 I used to log on to a chat program called Chatpop a few times a week, after 6pm when the dial up was free. The same users were there every time I logged in, so I guess that was a community. I also led a Rainbow Six 3 Team to 2nd to last place in an eSports league back in 2001. There are social websites I use on a regular basis, but I wouldn’t say that using those means I belong to that community. I use Facebook so I can see what my friends and family are up to, I search for hashtags to see reactions to current events on Twitter. I use Reddit because it allows users to create their own subreddits, if you want to chat about something niche these subreddits are usually the most popular forum on the internet for that topic. There are some people that you might classify as bad people using Reddit. I know you are thinking about The_Donald subreddit, since I use Reddit I am a bad person just like them.

I’ve seen quite a few interesting blog posts explaining why social networks full of bad people exist, the most interesting of which are actually not about Reddit, but are posts about 4chan. Of course, bad places spawn bad people, just look at Sweden. Swedes are good people that use good websites, but they have a liberal refugee policy, a policy to let in bad people that use bad websites. In the UK they don’t have to worry about this because the Queen looks through web history and does not allow Reddit users in.

The Queen also turns away 4chan users because they are the worst. We know they just how bad they are because of the things that they have done. The many blog posts describing 4chan go in to incredible detail about the platform’s history; the Habbo Raids, Serious Business, wearing masks made in a sweatshop in China for 4p to protest capitalism. These posts are interesting because 4chan does it’s best to obfuscate what it is about. It is actually really hard to find this information and piece it together in a coherent story. In fact, the authors of these posts work for GHCQ and watch all the Internet traffic go past in 1 and 0’s to be able to piece it all together. Being the good twitter using citizens they are, there is no way that the authors, who have this incredibly detailed and superior knowledge of the communities, have ever visited the communities themselves. Not like me, who once described 4chan to a friend as ‘The arsehole of the internet’. A description that I borrowed from a wiki documenting ‘e-drama’. The wiki was frequently edited by 4chan users, therefore promoting their self-hate and confirming my position as a bad person.

The posts talk about the history of evil enclaves on the internet to help understand how they got in their current state. Thanks to these posts we know the 15 year old, alt right “young beta males” of 4chan are the same ones that raided habbo pools 10 years, when they were 5. The bloggers know this because they work for GHCQ and most definitely not because 10 years ago they were a 15 year old and found themselves wondering in to a similar space themselves.

There is an issue with online harassment, the alt right, trolling and even without the bloggers it is also easy to find the places that spout a lot of this. We could know a lot about what makes these people tick because, like us, they are people. Alas, it is a shame we can’t really relate to the problem because we have never been there ourselves, we have never wanted to lash out because we are not terrorists. Imagine how good a blog post from an ex-4chan user would be, not just another post from someone who never did visit bad places online.

It is really difficult to talk about feelings and that may be why memes are particularly popular on ‘troublesome tech platforms’ that breed hate. It must be easier to joke than to ask the question “Why am I so angry”. I enjoy a lot of these ‘history of troublesome platform’ posts, but the people I am really jealous of are the people who don’t write a 30 minute read on the history of a platform, but say “today I did this thing, and then these people responded in a hateful way. Why did they respond that way?”. I have lots of these posts waiting to be written, but I’m too scared, so I just joke and make stuff up.

At a recent PhD seminar, a group of students had to talk about a particular thesis problem they had on two slides; mine was that I seemed to have created The NeverEnding Literature Review. I had lots of ‘themes’ in my literature review, and lots of different fields of study were interested in these themes, each field of study with a different take to digest and review. I started to complain about my review of data privacy literacy and how the Snowden revelations in 2013 when I had just started my thesis, had changed everything. About how every day a news item seemed relevant, the Investigatory Powers Act one day and Europe’s response the next. A lot of my thesis looks at ‘data-relationships’ between people and institutions. If we are aware of it or not, organisations take information from us and then feed it back through the services they provide; our consumption of these services then have a knock on effect to the data we generate. So far in my thesis, I have been calling this a positive feedback loop – I have been told that this has been recently deemed the ‘echo chamber’ (ToDo: ctrl c + ctrl v).

The group then started to discuss all the things they had seen in the news in the last month that could be relevant to my thesis. Things that they had read about in the last few months alone: fake news , the Investigatory Powers Act, Google algorithm bias etc etc. One of the students caught me off surprise and said that I needed to frame my work, that the discussion won’t just stop because my work isn’t about technology at its core – it is about civil liberties.
I think they were probably right – that my work is about our liberties, but it is also about technology. The fact we don’t understand what the ‘data collection–>analysis–>feedback’ loop does is oppressive. This raises the question, which is probably where my literature should sit: ‘how do we give an insight into what these relationships are doing?’.

How do we get an understanding of the algorithms? The problem is that we can’t just ‘teach’ them anymore. Firstly, because we don’t know what they are; I’d be very surprised if you could even get a top Google programmer to coherently explain the Google ranking algorithm even if they were allowed to. Secondly, because teaching these things doesn’t explain the knock-on effects to society. There is recognition that the 21st-century workplace needs these skills, we see this in a big push to teach I.T and coding skills all over the world. But when we try to teach computing concepts we tackle it as if they are things that can be learnt in a what Freire would call a banking education model, where we fill students up with knowledge like a piggy bank with spare coins. We can’t teach that way to explain the effects of data-relationships and the algorithms/statistical models/collection methods, how can we teach something we don’t understand?

Perhaps it is a tedious link, but understanding data-relationships is perhaps like Freire’s teaching of a second language. Do people have the time to sit down and work out which algorithms are deployed where? Why should they care? Isn’t the ability to contact Uncle Bob on FaceBook useful? I think we need to understand these relationships to protect our freedoms; perhaps we should spread the message through people’s immediate concerns in a ‘Working out the world before working out the algorithm approach’.

Back in September, I remember reading this Guardian post detailing the shenanigans of Palmer Luckey, The Oculus Rift founder who had been funding users of social network site Reddit to post pro-trump images and text. What struck me most about the article, was just how little information was actually in it, the gist was ‘young tech guy funds hate and he doesn’t care that his technology might not be used for good.’

The pro-Trump and anti-Hilary images were posted on Reddit, which is a ‘forum of forums’ and has a wide range of users with different opinions. What I find really interesting about forums and sites such 4chan and Reddit is that while the communications on there are very complex, they generate a simple narrative that explains what the forum represents, but by the time that narrative reaches a wider audience it is part of an in-joke that the users of the technology play up to. I don’t visit 4chan, but I get the narrative, they wear Guy Fawkes masks because they are anti-establishment – but the idea originated in an ‘epic fail guy meme,’ the image of the mask itself is copyright held by Time-Warner, and the masks are made in Chinese factors. They are saying ‘we are the anti-establishment, protector of the people – but a bit shit.’ More recently the narrative has shifted to identifying with social awkwardness, proudly calling themselves NEET, sharing videos on YouTube of them shouting ‘normies get out’ from their basement to their Mum. Still, as I try to explain the narrative know I am getting it wrong somewhere. How much truth is there and, which part of this is just a joke?. A few years ago Fox News released the now famous ‘hackers on steroids’ video. Depicting the users of 4chan as terrorists blowing up stadiums and forcing the elderly to buy dogs. It became a part of the in-joke. The Guardian post and its description of a ‘shit post’ as the thing Palmer’s minions are achieving, rather than what it is, does that same thing. A description of what might be going on that simplifies it too much and misses the mark. The described community then wear as a badge of pride. I’m well aware that my attempt at describing 4chan was no better than the Guardian’s description of Reddit shitposting. I don’t think it is lazy journalism; I don’t think we have the right tools, both on a technical and social level to work out what is happening in these fast moving communication channels.

There are a lot of articles in the news about hate on the Internet, a lot of the time we point back to the problem in technology, and each of these technologies apparently has a group of users with a narrative, it is the pre-teens on YouTube comments, the socially awkward protesters of 4chan, the ‘we used to be left wing, but now we are right wing’ Reddit posters, or your either being Louise mensch or Owen Jones on Twitter.

The speed of technological change and the sheer volume of traffic make it impossible to get a grip on what is going on, what the general opinion is, what is and is not a joke. These narratives make it easier to comprehend but don’t tell us anything. There was a mention of GamerGate in the Guardian rattle, and it is common for the paper to keep running these articles about hate online that briefly cross mention each other, but the Guardian lack the ability to say how or why. The BBC frontpage had three articles related to hate online yesterday. How to stop cyberbullying, celeb quits Twitter, and fake articles being removed from Facebook. Quicker than the guardian to try and verbalise what is going on, the BBC pick up there is something connected here, they think much of this supports far right views and labels much of the chatter from these communication channels as ‘alt-right.’ Are the BBC getting close to the core of the issue, or are they just creating another label the communities will live up to?

I don’t think the Guardian article is lazy; I think the fact that the speed of change obfuscates what is being said makes it hard to make work out what is going on. I do think, however, that this obfuscation gives us a get out clause to pick and choose what we defend. The stop funding hate campaign recently celebrated the fact Lego was not going to rerun the £700 advertisement in the Daily Mail again. The Spectator responded (in an outrageous piece I will not be linking to) that this was simply the left not liking what the right had to say about three judges, completely ignoring the homophobic (and anti ex-Olympic fencers) comments on the front page of a newspaper you could buy in 2016. At what point did it become acceptable to gloss over such things. Does those spouting hate speeches find it easier claim the titles and fit that narrative of an ‘alt-right’ than those trying to work out what is going on? Who wants to be a lefty luvvie or social justice warrior? South Park points to the hijacking of memories .’ ‘member Start Wars, ‘member Tatooine, ‘member the 70s, do you ‘member a time before the Mexicans took our jobs’ and that this becomes part of a communities narrative. What about when it wasn’t acceptable to call the first lady an ape?

What tools or frameworks do we need to work out what is going on in online communications?

“Through the prescience of the great oracle (then known as Prism), Donald Trump saw a threat to humanity. The dependency on algorithms would create a lack in exploration and growth of our souls, creating a stagnation that would eventually mean the end of the humanity. Trump decided that the way forward to surviving was to teach the humans new skills through bad example and came up with a strategy he called ‘El oro de la pared’. While the Trump rule had many bad examples that taught the human race well, there are two main ones that saved humanity:

The first stage of the plan was to refuse action on climate change. Trump set the stage for an age of suffering, which would become known as the ‘Gran Hambruna’. Without any action from the United States the world fell in to a mass climate change. A great famine on Earth led to the death of nearly 75% of Earths population.

The second stage of Trump’s plan was the blending of Mexicans and U.S states. While the Mexican clan was too small to rule humanity, they had passion. The the U.S clan lacked a desire to leave their algorithms behind and get their hands dirty. A great wall was constructed between the two.

With his head in his jar, the rule of Trump lasted 200 years. It was after his death, driven by the famine on Earth and the pent up desires to mix after 200 years apart, humanity explodes out into the universe in waves of migration known as the great movement. In space, The Golden Age of humanity began, not only had humanity survived the algorithms but it had a new passion from the blending of people. We met new friends in the stars and approached them with peace, the new peaceful ways that had spawned from many bad examples Trump had given us, we were indeed better people.

To those new friends – I hope I see you all on the other side.”

-Extract taken from the diary of Empress head in jar Caroline Lucas, the last known human text before the great ascent.

As part of the Jisc business intelligence project lots of clever folk from different HE Institutions are getting together, looking at data they know about and working with HESA to augment it with data HESA collects. The result is the creation of all kinds of interesting businesses intelligence dashboards and reports; many of which will be available through the replacement to the Heidi system- Heidi Plus. For the project Cetis is offering ‘data wrangling’ support, which involves giving a hand getting data in a format they the analysts can use.

One the things we’ve found that we get asked for a lot is simply CSV’s of universities that puts them in groups or ranking for easy comparison. Well known groups such such as mission groups, Jisc bands, Regional memberships, REF/RAE/REF Power scores etc etc. This data isn’t hard to get hold of, but requires the analysts to spend some time creating them manually, followed by lots more time making sure the institutions have a common identifier between data sets.

Cetis have a growing resource of simple data sets the analysts have found useful on Github, there are a few more that need to be cleaned up and added, but basically these consist of institutions, the grouping they belong to and the UKPRN.

This is a growing list as the project continues, but since we get asked a quite often for them it seemed worth sharing now. Here are the resources:

Data Wrangling Repo – Home for various scripts and the data sets that are commonly requested by the analysts

Cetis on BI CKAN – List of the common data sets we have hosted. Growing but currently includes UKPRN, name and band for:

I don’t have a point, writing drivel just helps. I had hoped we would stay.

Britain woke up on Friday morning to be congratulated by racists and fascists, they thought it was great news that we were leaving the EU. Hate crimes rose, the market crashed and the Leave campaign started to simply deny that any of the things they promised were actually promises. Within hours on social media the response from the Remainers was to shove this in the faces of Leavers.

The angry posts followed a two step thought process:

Either Leavers were racist/fascist, because the French National Front approve of your actions

Or, if they were not racist then they must be stupid, as things had happened just as experts had told them. The promises have already unraveled and markets already crashed.

Leavers said ‘we are not racist or stupid’ and logged off.

While offline, some Leavers went to play a nice game of cricket. To find the rest The Independent even headed up Salford Shopping precinct. The response was “We are not stupid or morons” , so the article came to the conclusion that they must be racist. But, this portrayal of Leavers being either racist or stupid is dangerous because it pushes them down the road of fascisim. Indeed, many horrible people did vote out because they belong in the same camp as Marine Le Pen, and these people quite frankly, have horrible views. But, there were many reasons to want to leave the EU. Ironically the treatment of many countries by the EU, particularly (but not limited to) Greece, has caused massive unrest lead and encouraging fascist groups. Is that the EU we want?

One the one hand I am angry at the leaders of the Leave campaign for not treating voters like grownups. It has become clear that many of the ‘promises’ where not promises at all. Why lie when there might be legitimate reasons to leave? Ironically, Corbyn’s ‘EU only gets a 7/10’ was one of the best starting points for talking about what we want change in Europe. On the other hand I am angry at ‘Remainers’ for not trying to understand why people who are not fascist or racist might want to vote out, and what it is that divides us.

A show I have always hated with a passion is Little Britain. Two comedians from a well-educated background mock a section of the population they perceive as being ill-educated and stupid, market it towards the targets and then expect them to laugh. This ‘us vs them’ culture can be found all over the UK. As Will Davies points out, those of us who have laughed at a ‘Chavs’ in such a way, ‘such as the millionaire stars of little Britain’ have something to answer for now. One of the hardest things to think about is why people who are gaining so much from the EU voted to leave. Regions such as Cornwall and south wales voted to leave despite getting lots of subsidies. But should the regions that might be getting lovely handouts be grateful?

The more educated voted to stay. Does that make a Remain voter better? No. This post uses the term ‘education apartheid’ and I can’t think of a better phrase. Should those in a cultural clampdown, unable to ‘articulate their feelings within the frame of the EU bureaucracy’ be grateful for these handouts? As we don’t actually know what is going to happen next, the backtracking on promises leave Remainers arguing there was no reason for anyone to vote to Leave at all. There is a popular Remain video of a man jumping in to the dark. But this wasn’t a vote for the future, this was a big cock and balls on the voting slip because there is no other way or articulating themselves in the framework we are debating.

It’s easy to get angry at those who wanted to protest vote, but this was a cry for help, a case of self-harm. Watching Corbyn collapse perhaps we did the same thing. Did Labour ever believe in him, or was his election to leader a big cock and balls on the slip? An example of the Labour party self-harming too? Was that a case of doing the exact same thing we are shaming Leave voters for.

There are lots of reasons people voted to Leave. Yes, some of them are racist. There are also some very complex reasons for people that we have failed. Every time we giggled at how stupid Farage or Boris might be, they stood there, took it and appealed to those who might get monetary handouts, but are denied mechanism for articulating themselves. Perhaps they feel nationalism gives them a voice? We need to give them an alternative before it becomes something really ugly.

In 1999 I was in my 3rd year at a high school that despite having a couple of tennis courts, swimming pools and various state of the art drama/music rooms somehow only managed to fund a single computing suite with machines running Windows 3.1. In your 3rd year at high school your parents are called in by different tutors to discuss how you are doing in their class and the possibilities of you picking it as a subject for GCSE . Despite the school refusing to believe that computers had a place in the future, that Windows versions past 3.1 were clearly unnecessary and there actually being no I.T options to pick, I was dreading my parents seeing my I.T tutor.

All I remember from the I.T classes at this the school at been to “press the B button in word to make the writing ‘blacker'”, and so, finding myself already using the ‘blackest’ of colours available very early in the lesson, I spent most of the class doing things outside of classroom activities. The activity I remember most is using an old program I discovered called Crocodile Clips, I could design and simulate circuits and it usually ended up with me working out how many batteries I needed to blow up 45 bulbs. I also remember poking the filesystem somewhat, my first introduction to SMB sharing support also gave my an insight to security as I found various files and directory that, according to the filenames, I shouldn’t have access to.

I did lots of things on those machines, most of which I may have forgotten, but I guess they still laid the foundations for future hobbies, education and eventually career. I always made sure that the tutor never caught me, I sat at the back and would switch to a word processing program whenever he came over, the mouse hovering over the bold button. When parents evening came and he saw my parents my fears were realised, Sir has spotted me doing things out of the set activities. To my surprise he was very impressed, he said I spent all my time exploring the system, pushing it as far as I could without doing any damage. He told my parents that they were upgrading to a better operating system and I wouldn’t be able to poke around the files anymore.

I was surprised to have been caught, I was so careful! I was even more surprised I didn’t get in trouble. I don’t know how I was caught, but knowing the eyes could be there, I never poked about again. Though that new operating system looked really fun..

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This site is a collection of things I've found interesting or wanted to write about. I often don't proof read - it is full of bad spelling, grammar mistakes. Sometimes there are better ways to explain or demonstrate things.

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